


your fake name is good enough for me

by judypoovey



Category: Fargo (2014)
Genre: M/M, everyone is bi as hell, it's the late 90s, mild violence, obviously, things i'm gonna regret tagging to follow:, this is so lame i'm so sorry guys, top numbers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 03:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2294582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the first year of their partnership is where it all happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your fake name is good enough for me

**Author's Note:**

> The title is an Iron & Wine song, I spent a lot of time reading really good Wrench/Numbers fanfiction but none of it lined up with the oddly specific headcanons I had come up with on my own so it was kind of like...I guess I gotta do this now. Short, alternating POV vignette-style slices of life. There will probably be one more 5000 word part.

There were rules to being an asset (an asset in most cases is a person who is paid to be as un-person-like as possible and basically doesn't legally exist, it's complicated) that Mr. Numbers, so called because of rule #2, had memorized a long time ago.

> Rule #1: You did what the bosses told you to do, in the amount of time they told you to do it.  
>  Rule #2: You never give them your name, they never give you their name. You live your life with whatever identity you want, as long as they don’t know it. You are not a person, you are an asset.  
>  Rule #3: Never put your name or handwriting on anything while working a case. And extension of this: pay cash. Always have small bills. Never make a scene in public. Remember! **_You do not exist._**  
>  Rule #4: When in doubt, eliminate witnesses.  
>  Rule #5: If you get caught, take Fargo to your grave.

Numbers had never really been great with the rules. Especially not #5. Fuck those guys, if they thought he was going to let himself get killed to protect their organization they could shove it up their ass.

But generally, Mr. Numbers did not encounter life or death situations. He wasn’t strictly a numbers guy but he was more of a talker. A fact-checker. When people asked what he did, he said he was a private investigator. It wasn’t far off.

Right now, one of their stations in South Dakota was under a change in management, and Numbers was checking their books. So far, the books were clean, everything was fine, and the next shipment wasn’t going to be delayed because Fargo’s guy had dropped dead of a heart attack.

“All of your assets are accounted for,” he told the new in-charge guy, the dead one’s second in command, trying to get the dude to stop leaning so far over his shoulder. “Except, what’s this one meant to be?” he asked, trying to decipher the trainwreck handwriting he was reading.

“Oh, that’d be the kid,” the guy, who had some obnoxious name like Jon Silver or something, said, pointing over to the back corner where a big, sleepy-looking guy in maybe his twenties was sitting on a crate.

“Who is he?” He was starting to get irritated, because this guy had been somehow both incredibly nosy and incredibly unhelpful.

“The boss’s nephew, he did security. I figure I’ll just let him decide if he wants to stay on with me or leave.” He paused and gave Numbers a hard look, furrowing his eyebrows and glancing over at the kid, who was now looking their way. “He’s not a security risk, he can’t talk.”

“Can’t?”

“I’ve never heard him say anything.”

Huh. Numbers went back to the work. “All right. Well, the bosses just wanted to verify everything was going to continue on smoothly while we change management, and it seems like you’ve got a good handle on it.” He patted the guy on the shoulder and folded up the invoices to pocket.

“You’re keeping those?” he asked, suddenly nervous. “Shouldn’t I --?”

The kid stood up and was walking towards them very deliberately. For a long frozen second of suspicion, Numbers stared at the guy; about his age but clean-cut and blond and edgy, with a fleshy neck and ears that stuck out.

He was sweating, too, reaching for something.

“Why would you need this?” he asked slowly, his eyes on the kid crossing the room, over sweaty Silver’s shoulder. “You should be starting a new one for the quarter.”

The guy opened his mouth and there was a loud crack. It happened so quickly Numbers could barely react. The guy hit the ground and blood splattered across Numbers’ front. Or maybe the blood was first. All he remembered was the noise. The thud and the weird throaty groan.

The kid dropped the wrench with a loud clatter and pointed to the back of the freshly made corpse. The rest of the employees were dead silent.

Kneeling down, Numbers pulled back his shirt and found exactly what he’d expected to find. A wire.

“How’d you know he was a cop?” he asked when he looked back up at the kid, looking away from the dark bloody hole in the back of his head. He wasn’t totally squeamish, but a little.

He shrugged.

“Do you talk?”

He shrugged again, looking standoffish.

Numbers went back to the office to call Fargo. “We had an undercover, we’re going to need a cleanup and a sweep of the rest of the employees. More than a one-man job. I’m bringing an asset home.”

“Who?”

“Nephew of the dead guy, supposedly. Took out the cop, saved all of our asses. Won’t be safe here.” He had found himself on an increasing number of jobs where he ended up having to call for backup or got stuck with a temporary partner, and they were all the kind of guys that bragged about everything. How much they went to the gym, how much they fucked their bored mob wives, how much they fucked their barely legal mob girlfriends, how big their shits were… Maybe this would be better.

“We’ll see you in two days, then. Your backup will arrive shortly.”

Numbers grabbed a notepad from next to the phone, and a pen, and walked out to where no one had really done anything about the dead pig on the floor.

He handed it to the kid. “Better?”

_Yes_.

“What’s your deal?” he asked.

_Deaf. Read lips._

Well that explained it. He racked his brain for the memory of his community college sign language lessons. Classes he’d spent too distracted by the hot teacher to really pay mind to. “Do you want to come to Fargo with me?” No use. He’d just have to say it.

_Why?_

“You saved my ass, call it a debt.”

_What would I be doing?_

“More of this,” he said, gesturing to the pool of blood with his foot and then guiding him away from the body. They walked along the length of the warehouse in silence, until the kid provided an answer.

“All right then, partner.”

\--

“So, Mr. Numbers and…Mr. Wrench.”

The name had been Numbers’ idea. An inside joke, since he hadn’t actually explained it to anyone else. He had an inside joke with someone. That was a first. Wrench, who guessed the name wasn’t so bad, had never been to Fargo before. He had never met anyone so high up on the food chain, though he expected this bespectacled guy wasn’t all that important. A go-between for the assets and the bosses.

“Well, when we have a job for you, we’ll call.”

Wrench’s past few days had been more than a little hectic, but honestly he thrived in that kind of environment. Finally nailing that asshole cop after months of being ignored was more satisfying than he wanted to admit. He shouldn’t be happy about braining someone with a wrench, but he guessed he wasn’t in this line of work for nothing.

Numbers…well, he didn’t know how to feel about Numbers. He didn’t talk much and when he did, he got right to the point, which Wrench liked. But he was another one of Fargo’s hired hands and he didn’t know that he could _trust_ him.

‘L-U-N-C-H?’ Numbers carefully finger-spelled, and Wrench nodded. This was more effort than anyone else had ever made.

They got burgers at some hole in the wall diner Numbers seemed to frequent. He draped his coat and scarf over the back of his chair and Wrench did the same, flipping open the menu and scanning it. He slid it over to Numbers and pointed at what he wanted.

‘No M-A-Y-O.’ He didn’t often deal with people who knew any sign language so more often than not he just endured mayonnaise. His uncle knew, though, and now so did Numbers.

Numbers ordered for them with a charming smile at the redheaded waitress and off she went, but she cast a curious glance back at them before she disappeared into the kitchen. It was nothing new.

_I’ll get you a room at a motel while things get settled,_ Numbers wrote down on a battered notepad. _OK?_

He nodded in the affirmative and took a sip of his root beer, before sliding the notepad back towards himself. _Is there a library around here?_

Numbers nodded. “Want to go after lunch?”

Wrench nodded.

_This food is good,_ he wrote down once he got his burger.

“Glad you like it.”

They ate their meals without talking, which was fine by him, they didn’t have much to say really. Then they went to the library, which was bigger than the one he’d frequented back home. Signing up for a library card, he debated on using his real name or assuming a fake, and ended up going with his real. It would be too much of a hassle to maintain a fake identity for the day to day grind, and he didn’t have a fake ID on him anyway.

It was simpler to just be himself for a while.

He got a couple of books that had interesting looking covers and caught Numbers covertly trying to check out a book on sign language, which made him smile. Numbers took that whole “lifesaving” thing really seriously, he guessed. He really thought he owed Wrench something.

He didn’t comment on the book when they left, in case he was trying to be sneaky.

After driving around looking, Numbers seemed to find a motel to his satisfaction. “Check in there, and I’ll ca…” At least he’d caught it before he’d actually said it. “I’ll come by with any news. Make sure you’re in your room as much as possible.”

He nodded, rolling his eyes. Did Numbers think he was a puppy that would run off if the door was open too long? Whatever.

Numbers gave him enough cash for three nights and said they’d find him a new place on the third night. It was best to jump around, and use a fake name if you’re worried. Wrench wasn’t worried, who would ever think to look for him?

\--

The call came in late or early, and Numbers was annoyed. He’d dozed off with the book on his chest – some basic sign language bullshit because lip-reading and writing notes must get tiring for the kid. It got tiring for him – and it clattered to the floor, losing his place, when he reached over to answer.

“You’re needed in Sioux Falls by noon.”

“That’s a _four_ _hour drive_ ,” he groaned. Traveling was part of the job he had never really gotten used to. He hated driving. “Shouldn’t we get more than six hours’ notice?”

“That’s why you need to leave in less than two hours. Get your associate and go. Provisions are with the car. We’ve had several shipments come in short and think our connection is skimming. Four days.” With that, the line went dead.

Four hour drive at six in the morning for a couple of bags of stolen heroin or a few stolen guns? Ugh.

But he packed a bag and pulled on his clothes, but upon further inspection discovered his socks didn’t match, which was going to drive him nuts so he had to stop and fix it before he could leave. He made himself and Wrench travel mugs of coffee and then set off, still half-delirious from sleep.

He sneaked into the motel the back way, not wanting to deal with the snippy girl at the front desk, climbing over a metal railing, almost busting his ass, casually brushing it off (no one saw that!), and walking up to Wrench’s room.

Wrench was in bed, half asleep and sheepish, pulling covers up but failing to look clothed when Numbers opened the door and flicked the light a few times to wake him up.

‘We have a job.’

He blinked a few times, as if he didn’t understand, but then he signed: ‘Where?’

‘S-I-O-U-X F-A-L-L-S.’

Wrench nodded.

 ‘Let’s go. In a hurry.’

Wrench got up and moved around unselfconsciously, clad in nothing but boxers. Numbers didn’t stare. He was polite like that.

Once his partner was dressed, they went down to the car. Wrench cleaned up the room and left a little bit of money on the bed as an apology for not properly checking out, and then insisted that he should drive. Numbers was fine with that, frankly he hated driving.

Plus he didn’t actually have a real license after prison, but that was a story for another time. It never really stopped him, but he was always aware of the one extra risk he was taking.

‘You’ve been practicing,’ Wrench said while they were sitting at a stoplight. Then he sipped his coffee, which he took with way too much sugar.

He had practiced with Wrench a couple of time, learning things that you weren’t likely to find in a book – gun, knife, general job-related signs – and he’d also done a lot of reading at home. It felt pathetic to him, he felt like he should be learning faster, but the faint praise Wrench had just gave him made it somehow even more embarrassing. He was just trying to make this whole partnership thing easier.

He’d always liked working with other people, honestly. He found most of the people that gravitated towards their line of work exhausting, but the idea of having a partner always appealed to him. Someone to watch your back and share the load? It spoke to the lazy asshole that lived inside of him and wanted to do as little work as possible. He just had never met anyone in the business he’d liked, until now.

And Wrench seemed like a good kid. Well, good for their line of work. He seemed smart and funny and he didn’t seem like he was in it because he got off on hurting people, but he also didn’t seemed bothered by it either.

It was a good balance.

This would make or break them, though. It was early enough in the game that Numbers could cut Wrench loose if he had to. He really hoped he didn’t, though.

\--

Getting invited to poker seemed like something personal, like a step towards some kind of friendship. They were back from their first job, which had been a success, and Numbers’ usual ritual of celebration was to have a few other Fargo guys over for poker. Why anyone wanted to play poker with a guy called Numbers was beyond Wrench, but everyone got their asses kicked.

The apartment was exactly like he imagined it: all hardwood and black leather, with no personal affects or indications anyone even lived there. It looked like an apartment in a television show, not somewhere real. But he kind of liked it.

He knew the guys were talking to Numbers about him, mostly because Numbers was translating some of the shitty comments about him. At least, the funny ones.

‘He wants to know how you pick up girls.’  

Numbers gestured to the guy across from them. His toupee was bad and his face reminded him of a rat.

‘Tell him it wasn’t that hard to pick up his mom last night,’ he replied.

Numbers said something, probably not that. For all he’d managed to become a half-decent translator, he did very little actual translating. ‘I told him you nailed his wife, instead. Mother’s dead.’ How sensitive of him.

Wrench laughed. 

‘The other guy thinks you look G-A-Y.’ He stopped, apparently a little startled by the look on Wrench’s face, which had definitely gone a little red. ‘I told him you’d kill him if he said it again.’

 ‘Good. I will.’ He drew his finger across his throat, looking at the now squirming, uncomfortable guy. ‘Tell him he looks like something my diabetic cat would shit out. And his shirt is garbage.’

Numbers laughed. ‘He looks like he sweats bacon fat.’ Of course he knew the sign for bacon, he lived in diners. Wrench didn’t think he’d taught him that one.

‘I can almost smell it.’

Numbers won poker, as previously mentioned. The guys paid out, begrudging, and Wrench went for his own wallet as they were leaving.

‘Don’t,’ he said, finishing off his beer and counting his cash. ‘You’re good.’

‘I got my ass kicked.’ He was terrible at cards, really, but he insisted that it wasn’t even something that needed any skill, anyway. It was all luck, but he didn’t have any of that either. ‘I owe you.’

“Nah, they were being shitty, I made them pay what you lost.”

He got a sense of what a few of them were saying about him, just from watching them talk, but if it had been bad enough that Numbers was being apologetic, he guessed he’d missed a lot of it. He’d seen a lot of ‘kid’ and ‘tagalong’. Numbers had only translated funny bullshit, well and the gay comment, but to forty-something mobsters he guessed anyone in their 20s who looked like they showered more than once a week gave off "gay vibes" (what that even meant, he didn't know).

Wrench found making friends very tedious for a reason.

‘What did you say?’

‘Told them go fuck themselves,’ he said. ‘You’re my partner.’ Wrench’s favorite sign, because he’d never had a partner before. ‘I didn’t know you were -- ’ He was looking thoughtful, a little uncomfortable with his own process maybe.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t know you were.’ He made a vague hand gesture, as if that explained what he meant. ‘G-A-Y?’

Wrench responded with the same indistinct hand gesture, too mortified to correct him or confirm his suspicions. He didn’t know which would be worse and he desperately didn't want to talk about it.

‘Not?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You like both?’ He looked surprised. 

‘I’m going back to my motel,’ he signed, grabbing his coat. Numbers stopped him, though.

‘Too many beer,’ he said, making a complete mess of it. Sometimes he seemed like he had it handled, and then he let his drunk brain overtake him and he fucked up. It was funny. ‘Take the couch.’

‘Thank you.’ He wasn’t sure if he was actually grateful or if he was just saying that to get Numbers off his back, but he helped him clean up after the guys and put everything back in its proper space. Numbers threw a couple of blankets on the couch and went off to his own room a few minutes later.

\--

Numbers was losing his patience with this guy.

He stammered and cried and threatened to vomit and Numbers was this close to just shooting him.

They were looking for a guy that had been picking off one of their club’s girls. The strippers were terrified and the bosses were losing money, so of course it was time to intervene. It was nice to have a job in town, he hated the shitty hunting and fishing cabins they always ended up in.

Wrench tapped his watch impatiently.

“Again, then,” Numbers said, sighing. He jammed his pocket knife into the webbing of the guy’s hand while Wrench jammed the sock down his throat. They were developing a good rhythm, now.

But it didn’t always work. Last time, a guy had choked on his vomit and his tongue before anything useful had been said.

The guy gasped and shuddered and finally started talking. “I think he called himself Greg,” he wheezed. Why didn’t bad guys ever have cool names? “He was lurking around, not paying for dances.” Their witness, this sobbing mass of bullshit, was a part time bouncer at the club, and their prime suspect. “I asked him to leave and he did, but he made the girls nervous. Hadn’t seen him before, we got a lot of regulars.”

“Thanks, Phil old pal. We’ll be by if we need anything,” he said, pulling his knife out of the guy’s hand, wiping the blood on Wrench’s jeans, earning him a middle finger and a wrinkled nose. He patted the guy on the cheek, like he normally did, and off they went. He heard the guy vomiting before they got out in the street.

‘Why do you do that?’ Wrench asked, out of the blue.

‘Do what?’ he asked, wondering where they’d get lunch today.

Unbidden, Wrench reached out and touched Numbers’ face. He was taken aback, until he realized he meant it as an explanation for something too awkward to put to words.

‘Oh.’ He paused. He didn’t know why he did that. It was just a habit. ‘It’s what I do.’

Wrench narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

‘It scares guys like this,’ he added, though really he was just guessing at why he started it. ‘Being touched by other men. Bad to them, usually.’

‘And when it’s not?’

‘Well, they die just the same,’ he signed with a grin. A few months with Wrench, doing nothing but signing behind people’s back and living in their own private bubble had made him shockingly unselfconscious about how he was seen in public. He was always aware, because it came with the job, but if soccer moms and kids wanted to stare at them as they signed, whatever. Usually he got defensive when he was ogled, but with someone who stuck out as badly as Wrench did, it barely mattered.

Wrench didn’t seem amused by his comment.

‘Do you want to pick what we have for lunch?’

He nodded, that seemed to cheer him up.

\--

Wrench didn’t know when he’d moved into Numbers’ apartment, but after a straight week he didn’t seem like he was going to leave any time soon.

Numbers always used beer to keep him there. He didn’t know if it was just out of concern – he constantly criticized the motel beds – or if he just liked the company, but Wrench kind of liked it. He didn’t do that well by himself, he liked to at least be near other people, even if they weren’t paying any attention to him.

Numbers’ couch was better than shitty hotel mattresses, so he was fine to leave his suitcases there in the guise of ‘just in case there’s a job’ and he barely batted an eye when he woke up to find Numbers piling his dirty shit (woefully unwashed for weeks, Wrench had never really learned) into a laundry basket.

Wrench went and made pancakes.

It was very normal, having a roommate.

They were still almost edgy around each other. Sometimes it hit Wrench at the oddest times that this man was a killer, and had been a killer probably much, much longer than he had. It didn’t make him nervous, not really, just made him feel tight around the edges. That was the only way to describe it. Primed. Ready for the tight rubber band of their partnership to snap.

In a typical conflict situation he was comfortable with the fact that he was the biggest guy in the room. He doubted that meant much to Numbers.

But with his sleeves rolled up, his top two buttons undone and a beer in his hand, the illusion of a normal man was firmly locked into place. They were two guys out at the bar, having a drink, and they would go home and pass out and tomorrow laugh about their hangovers. Wrench would call Numbers old, Numbers would call him green, which only made him sound even older. It was so deceptively normal.

Wrench finished his drink and tapped Numbers’ arm. He was busy talking to a woman, judging by the ring on her hand she was a mob wife. Their usual bar was the haunt of other Fargo types. She seemed a little miffed when Numbers turned to him. He sympathized, it annoyed him that Numbers was ignoring him in favor of her. It felt like a well-earned revenge to win back his attention.

‘Another?’

He nodded, and ordered another round, then he leaned over and told the women – bleach blond hair and fairly pretty, about the same age as Numbers – some kind of joke. Or, well, she laughed. That usually meant a joke had happened. He turned and made an effort to repeat the joke to Wrench, but found it didn’t translate into sign language and gave up.

Wrench was fine to just watch the crowd, but when a fairly aggressive and vaguely familiar trio of men came in, looked right at the woman Numbers was flirting up a storm with, and started walking towards them, he tried to get Numbers’ attention again.

Numbers waved him off twice until Wrench finally slammed his hand down on the bar. Numbers turned around, incredulous, but it was too late, the guy leading the pack threw the first punch. It was probably about the woman, but Wrench wasn’t really paying attention to the whys.

He grabbed the nearest guy and slammed his face into the bar, standing up and toppling the stool he’d been sitting on. Numbers was laughing at the guy, blood running down his face from the one lucky shot. No one was intervening, the third guy – the smallest of them, a good three inches shorter than Numbers and thin as a rail – grabbed a vodka bottle and the broken glass rained down over the struggle between Numbers and the pissed off husband.

The woman was long gone.

The big guy recovered while Wrench was distracted by the glass, and he got a lucky shot in, a solid punch to Wrench’s gut. He hit the floor and winced at the stabbing pain in his back. Anyone whose go-to was breaking bottles was a moron, and now everyone was suffering.

Numbers grabbed the neck of the bottle, the only in-tact part, and shoved the jagged edge into the big guy’s face, right into his eye. All Wrench saw was blood as he scrambled to his feet and dragged the instigator back, tossing him into a stack of unused chairs. Numbers took his least favorite knife to the skinny one’s wrist, pinning it to the bar, and they turned and walked out, leaving a fifty dollar bill and the knife still embedded in the wood.

When they got outside, warm summer air stinging bruises and wounds, Numbers turned.

‘You OK?’

‘You’re bleeding,’ Wrench replied, reaching over to wipe some blood off his partner’s neck.

‘Too drunk, don’t feel it.’

When they got home – Numbers’ apartment, had that really become home already? – they both stumbled into the bathroom to take a shower at the same time.

‘Come on, look at me,’ Numbers whined. ‘I’m wrecked.’

‘I have glass in my back.’

Somehow, they ended up both sitting in the bathtub in nothing but their boxers, the water pouring over them, helping each other pick shards of glass out of hair and flesh. Numbers vomited into the toilet and stayed there, half in the tub and half awkwardly hanging out. Wrench pulled him back, and was coherent enough to turn off the water before he passed out, but not enough to get them out of the tub.

They both woke up freezing.

\--

A guy Numbers had worked with once told him that working with a partner, like a real partner, could become sort of a crutch. You looked at them and felt validated, like you weren’t alone. In a line of work that routinely involved killing people, everyone needed some kind of reassurance that this wasn’t the worst you could be. Some guys had wives and kids they went home to and that probably made them feel normal, but Numbers did not. There was a level of intimacy in partnerships, the guy said, that made men do odd things.

All of this was simply to explain to Numbers why he preferred to work alone.

Numbers had never really bought into it, but with Wrench now, he wondered if that was the case.

He didn’t really have the words to ask him, so he settled for something else.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked, pouring them both a cup of coffee. It was an early morning sometime in June, and they were both just waking up.

‘Oklahoma. Moved to S-D when I turned 19.’

‘To your uncle?’ he asked, pouring in Wrench’s billionth spoon of sugar (only slightly an exaggeration) and then setting down the cup in front of his partner.

‘Yes. Only one that wanted me.’

And they both knew how that turned out. Maybe it was good. For the best.

‘You?’

Numbers took a second to consider what he was asking. (Was it do you want me or – wait no, it was just the same question asked again. None of that. Shut up, brain.) ‘D-E-T-R-O-I-T.’

‘How’d you get here?’

‘Married into it. Then gambling debts. Prison. Ex-wife had connections.’ He didn’t actually talk much about his ill-fated mob marriage, right this second it didn’t seem appropriate to talk about his wife, considering where his mind had been a few seconds ago.

‘Where is she now?’ And Numbers could tell Wrench thought she was dead. That was the usual narrative, right? Regardless of what he thought, he was surprised by Numbers’ amusement.

‘Remarried. In C-H-I-C-A-G-O.’

Wrench nodded and sipped his coffee, and the conversation dwindled away. Numbers knew very little about his partner. The facts went as such: he valued his personal space, he liked to read, he constantly dressed like he was an extra in a John Wayne movie, and he was a dog person. That last one was just a guess based on Wrench’s general temperament.

Numbers was not really an animal person.

‘How long were you in prison?’ Wrench asked.

‘3 years. Ever been?’

‘To visit my dad,’ Wrench said, an oddly candid look on his face. This was the most they’d ever admitted about themselves and it felt weird to Numbers. He never shared with anyone, but after six months it seemed like it was time to be honest with each other. ‘Why’d you go?’

‘Money laundering.’ He didn’t know if there was an actual sign for that, so what he signed seemed more like he’d literally put money in the laundry. But Wrench seemed to get it. ‘It’s where I got the name. Numbers, I mean.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Used to call me N-I-C-K-Y N-U-M-B-E-R-S,’ he explained, before freezing entirely. They both stared at each other, and Numbers was aware that he had just given Wrench a lot of rope to hang him with.

Wrench took it in stride, smiling and nodding. ‘When I was in school. Like prison, right?’ Numbers nodded, his momentary horror replaced by amusement. ‘They called me Frankenstein. Didn’t realize it wasn’t the monster.’

They both laughed and Numbers got up to get them more coffee.

When he sat back down, Wrench tapped on the table to make sure he had his attention.

‘H-E-N-R-Y.’ It was a nice gesture, helping Numbers cover his ass after that slip, but that wasn’t what they needed to do.

Numbers shook his head. ‘Wrench. Numbers. Be professional.’


End file.
